


Two (Sort Of) Truths and One Complete Lie

by igrockspock



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Backstory, Female Friendship, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-02
Updated: 2014-11-02
Packaged: 2018-02-23 15:12:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,104
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2552159
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/igrockspock/pseuds/igrockspock
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Melinda May was married once.  Good luck finding out to whom.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Two (Sort Of) Truths and One Complete Lie

**Author's Note:**

  * For [AlphaFlyer](https://archiveofourown.org/users/AlphaFlyer/gifts).



"You were _married_?" Skye asks, eyes wide.

Melinda says nothing and makes a mental note to kill Bobbi Morse at the first available opportunity.

Skye, of course, is undeterred by Melinda's poker face. "When? How? Who? I have to know."

Melinda grits her teeth. "If you can run a marathon on the treadmill, I just might tell you," she says. Of course, she has no intention of making good on the deal, but twenty-six miles ought to keep Skye out of her hair long enough for her to find and execute Agent Morse.

"I'm not a sucker," Skye says. "I know you're trying to get rid of me."

"Then let me put it this way," Melinda says. "Go run a marathon on the treadmill. _Now_."

***

Skye is lying on the sofa in the rec room, red-faced and panting, when Melinda sees her next.

"What the hell happened to you?" Hunter asks. "And do you plan to disinfect the sofa now that you've sweated all over it?"

"May made me run a marathon," she says. "And if you think my sweat is the nastiest thing that's gotten on this sofa--"

"Don't finish that sentence," Melinda says. If she finds out what happens on that couch, she'll have to give up her favorite reading spot.

"Why did May make you run a marathon?" Hunter asks.

"I asked about her ex-husband," Skye says, sitting up and grinning.

"You were married?" Hunter asks.

Melinda ignores him. She does not, as a rule, acknowledge his presence except in life or death situations.

"You're going to have to tell me sometime," Skye says. "Unless you want me to research myself."

"Fine." Melinda sits down on the coffee table in front of Skye and resists the urge to stab Hunter in the chest when he moves in closer. "It was Coulson."

" _Phil_?" Skye gasps. 

Hunter, wisely, says nothing, but Melinda can _feel_ him grinning.

"Yes, Coulson," she says patiently. "It was a long time ago, and we realized we were better off as friends." And she and Phil can get a good laugh out of this little charade later. She stands up to leave, but Skye narrows her eyes.

"Wait a second," she says. "Bobbi said you don't talk to your ex anymore."

"If Agent Morse weren't so useful to SHIELD..." Melinda mutters, closing her eyes.

She opens them and Bobbi is standing in the doorway, smirking. "You'd kill me?" she asks. "You'd be welcome to try, Agent May."

"Gym, five thirty," Melinda barks. She'd better get a good fight out of this at least.

(She and Phil had gotten drunk and kissed each other once, back at the Academy.

"Is this what it feels like to kiss your brother?" she'd asked.

Phil wrinkled his nose. "I don't know. I don't have any brothers. But I think it might be."

They agreed to never speak of it again.)

***

Almost three weeks go by before Skye asks again. Melinda thought she'd forgotten; in retrospect, Skye was just waiting for her to get her guard down.

The team is flying back from Reykajavik. They're _all_ exhausted -- but while everyone else is asleep in their seats, Melinda is in the cockpit, flying. The rest of the team is rotating through the co-pilot's seat one hour at a time, tasked with keeping Melinda awake by whatever means necessary. To be clear, Melinda hates Ward for a lot of things: almost killing FitzSimmons, murdering Victoria Hand, betraying her, betraying SHIELD. It's a long list, riddled with duplicity and nefarious deeds. But at the moment, she hates him most of all for leaving her as the team's only capable pilot.

Her hate ratchets up another notch when Skye plops down in the co-pilots chair, her grin only slightly muted by the dark circles under her eyes. "You know what I'm going to ask," she says. "Who's the ex?"

Melinda takes her eyes off the controls just long enough to glare. "You think I'm so exhausted I'll just spill everything?"

Skye shrugs. "It's worth a try, right? If you don't talk to me, you'll fall asleep and kill us all."

"Fine." May gives what she hopes is a defeated sigh. "It was Barton. Clint Barton. You can have two questions."

Skye's eyes go wide. " _Hawkeye_? Be honest. Did you marry him just for his arms?"

_Stupid question_ , Melinda thinks. Not that she would blame anyone who _did_ marry Clint for his arms.

"No," May says slowly. "I married him because he was infuriating. In a good way." 

"Huh," Skye says, biting her lip as she ponders the next question. "Tell me about your wedding."

May lets her lips curl up in a small smile. "Easy," she says. "It was Vegas. We were drunk."

Skye snorts. "I'll admit, you had me going for a minute there, the way your eyes got all distant. But there is _no way_ you got drunk and got married in Vegas."

Melinda shrugs. "Better luck next time," she says.

(A long time ago, Natasha Romanov had taught her how to tell the truth so that it sounds like a lie. She'd learned the lesson well.)

***

Next time is the split second Skye manages to get Melinda in a choke hold in the sparring ring.

"Tell me about the guy you married," she says, just before Melinda elbows her in the solar plexus.

"Who says it was a guy?" she asks.

***

The next time Skye asks, they're locked in the cargo hold of an ice breaking ship in the Arctic Circle. Melinda isn't much of an alarmist, but she thinks they might actually be about to freeze to death. Their captors had stripped off most of their protective gear, and huddling together to share their warmth doesn't do much good when their core body temperature is plummeting.

Melinda pulls Skye toward her more tightly. "Come on, Skye, stay with me," she says. "Keep talking."

Skye glares at her, and Melinda knows exactly how she feels: nothing sucks more than when you're tired and in pain and all you want is to pass out, but some asshole keeps poking you and demanding that you stay awake.

"Tell me about the _person_ you married," Skye says through gritted teeth.

"Maria Hill," Melinda says without even thinking.

Skye looks up at her, as if she's capable of reading Melinda's face. "What happened?" she asks.

Melinda gives her a little smile, just to keep her talking. "She became the deputy director of SHIELD. There was no time for a relationship after that."

"So what? You just gave up?" Skye asks, and Melinda forceably reminds herself that Skye hasn't had many people in her life to hold onto. If Melinda had grown up that way, she might think divorce was unthinkable too.

"We were both married to our jobs," she says. "After awhile, we just...had to be honest about that. You can only spend so much time apart before your feelings change."

"But you don't talk to each other now?" Skye asks through chattering teeth.

"No, not really. We did for awhile, but it's hard to move on when you're looking at the one who got away." 

Just then, the door swings open and Hunter greets them with a grin and a gun. _Thank god,_ Melinda thinks. She was about to run out of feelings to invent.

(The truth is, once upon a time, Melinda and Maria had slept together so many times that it almost became a relationship. But then Maria had been promoted, and there were fraternization rules and weird schedules and immense distances, and after awhile, they did the adult thing and let each other go. For a little, Maria _had_ been the one who got away, but Melinda had a plane to fly and missions to fulfill, and she'd never been one to dwell on what might have been.)

***

They say you should never let your guard down at the end of a mission. That's when some adversary you'd underestimated slits your throat -- or ambushes you with an inappropriate demand for personal information.

She and Skye are traveling _plastkartny_ on a train through Kazakhstan. There are a hundred and twenty-eight beds in their compartment, each occupied by belching, hairy men or sharp-eyed old women arguing over whether Skye or Melinda is a better match for their sons. The train rattles and shudders, and every jolt sends a fresh wave of ammonia from the toilet cubicle wafting through the air. As missions go, it sucks. The oh-eight-four they'd come to steal had been gone, and six Hydra agents had disappeared right along with it. So they're engaging in an old SHIELD tradition: passing a cheap bottle of vodka back and forth on a train from hell.

Melinda's feeling mellow, drifting in old memories when Skye leans over and asks, "So what happened between you and Barton?"

Melinda's poker face slips, and Skye smirks.

"Who do you think I am?" she asks. "Marriage certificates are public record. It wasn't exactly hard to find." 

Melinda says nothing. Skye takes another long pull from the bottle and keeps smirking. "This is a long train ride," she says. "Just _think_ how annoying I could be in" -- she checks her watch theatrically -- "another eighteen hours."

Melinda sighs and snatches the half-empty bottle from her hand.

The truth is, being with Clint hadn't been easy. He climbed inappropriate things and liked to come into the house through the bathroom window. If you let him go to the grocery store, he'd come back with a cart full of junk food, and if you asked him to make dinner, he'd expect you to be grateful for a carton of mac and cheese. For all his seeming slovenliness, he absolutely _had_ to keep everything clean, and god forbid you ever disagreed with him about how to mop the floor. He thought Valentine's Day was the best day to start a prank war. And no matter how good you thought your story was, he'd open his mouth and say, "this one time, when I was in the circus..." and you were toast. There was not a single day in their five-year relationship that he didn't make Melinda mad.

Not that _she_ was an easy person to be with. The truth was, she was about as affectionate as a tempermental housecat. You never really knew if she would purr or claw your face off -- or both, at the same time. She never, ever let Clint fly the plane, and she liked to perform illegal aerial maneuvers while he bitched about her in the cargo hold. Sometimes she left stray socks on the floor just to make him mad, and she liked to ambush him as he was coming out of the shower -- and not in a sexy way.

They fought. All the time. So loudly that sometimes their neighbors called the police. But they never broke up, not even for a day, and eventually they landed in front of an altar. She hadn't lied to Skye about one thing: they had been drunk. But after they sobered up, they'd decided to keep each other. The screaming fights had died down. He came in through the front door at least fifty percent of the time, and in exchange, she stopped leaving socks right where they'd get jammed in the bedroom door. SHIELD threw them a party. Her mother spent eighteen and a half months lamenting that her only daughter had gotten married without inviting her to the wedding, but she forgave them in exchange for a few exploding arrows.

They weren't happy, not exactly, but they were a lot of things that mattered a hell of a lot more: stimulated, bemused, entertained, and turned on, to name a few. It was going to last. And then Bahrain happened.

Clint got angry with her for almost dying (like their jobs weren't dangerous, like he didn't know what Melinda _did_ for a living). Melinda got mad at herself for killing eighteen people with her bare hands and having the audacity to come out alive. Then Clint got mad at Melinda for being mad about not dying, and the silence that reigned in their house was worse than all their screaming fights put together. But still no one said _divorce_.

On their fifth anniversary, she came home and there was an enormous slab of Vahlrona chocolate on the table next to two glasses of red wine. Clint only liked wine that came out of a box, so Melinda knew he was making a sacrifice for her. 

"I fucked up," he said, all puppy dog eyes. "Five years and I still don't know how to do this. I don't know how to be a functional human being."

Melinda hadn't known what to say; she'd had all sorts of advantages that Clint had not, like a mother who cared and three square meals a day, and she _still_ didn't know how to be a functional human being. She'd taken the wine glass out of Clint's hand and swallowed it in one smooth gulp and kissed him hard to say _I still love you_. He'd kissed her back slowly, his calloused hand cradling the back of her head, and she'd let him make love to her for the first time since Bahrain.

But afterward, in the shower, she'd stared down at her hands -- hands that had killed eighteen people, all by themselves -- and knew she didn't want or deserve to get better. In the morning, she packed a duffle bag and took the train to her mom's, knowing that Clint would get the message. When the papers came, she signed them without looking, and stayed gone long enough for Clint to move out of what used to be their home. And then, somehow, she didn't get off the couch for a few more weeks.

Melinda woke up one morning and her mother was looming over her, arms crossed. "Are you going to kill yourself?" she demanded.

Melinda sat up, suddenly indignant. "I -- _no_ , Mom. I would _never_." She hadn't even _thought_ about that, not even on her worst day.

"Good. Then it's time for you to get the fuck off my couch and get a therapist," her mother said. She snatched the afghan off the couch and started folding it with quick, angry motions. 

Melinda blinked. Her mother crossed her arms over her chest and frowned.

"If you're not going to die, you might as well find a way to live," she said. She handed Melinda a business card. "I made an appointment for you. Dr. Dehner is very good -- all the CIA girls say so." Melinda opened her mouth to ask exactly how much her mom had told the CIA about her pathetic daughter on the couch, but her mom held up a hand. "I'm not listening to any complaints." She handed Melinda her shoes, a stack of freshly washed laundry, and a train ticket. "I washed your clothes and booked you a ticket on the 11:30 back to D.C. Keep your appointment. Live in your house or get an apartment, I don't care. And for god's sake, if you're not going back to SHIELD, get another job."

Melinda sighed and jammed her feet into her shoes. She put the laundry in her duffle bag and took the train. She spent the first two appointments glaring silently at Dr. Dehner, and on the third one, she started to talk. SHIELD hired her as a mission coordinator, and she sold the house and replaced it with a sleek, industrial condo. Clint moved on, because that's what ex-husbands do, but Phil comes back, because that's what friends do. And maybe she didn't feel _alive_ , not exactly, but she functioned. She did good in the world, and she didn't hurt anyone by accident, choice, or necessity.

Then Phil died, and everything changed again. And Melinda ended up traveling _plastkartny_ on a creaking Kazakh train next to a secret agent wannabe who didn't know how to keep her nose where it belonged.

There's really not enough vodka in the world to make her share even a shred of that story with Skye or anyone else. She grits her teeth and takes another shot. And Skye is _still_ looking at her. The only escape is the reeking toilet cubicle, and Melinda's not _that_ desperate.

"Bahrain happened," she says. "That's all you get."

Skye smiles. "Have I exceeded my emotional vulnerability quota for the month?"

"Try six," Melinda says, but she smiles back -- a little bit -- and passes Skye the bottle.

***

Later, Melinda stands outside Phil's office and eavesdrops as he debriefs Skye. If he didn't want her to hear it, he ought to have closed the door.

"She said _both_ B words to you? In one conversation?" Phil asks, sounding incredulous.

"Barton and Bahrain, check and check," Skye confirms.

"She must really like you then," Phil says.

Melinda rolls her eyes, making a mental note to tell Phil how obnoxious it is when he sets people on secret missions to become her friend. Then the debriefing turns back to the actual mission, and Melinda wanders toward the rec room. She can finish her book before she has a word with Phil.

She's ten pages from the end of _Gone Girl_ when Skye saunters in and takes two beers out of the fridge. Then she plops down on the couch next to Melinda. Melinda doesn't look at her because she's _reading_ dammit, and anyway, Skye is her student, not her friend.

"Beer?" Skye says, holding out one of the bottles, and Melinda takes it because it would be rude not to. 

Skye just sits there, looking at her, until Melinda sighs and passes her the bowl of edamame she'd heated up earlier this afternoon.

"Thanks, friend," Skye says, smiling smugly.

Melinda rolls her eyes. "Don't get any ideas," she says. "Just because you know the name of my ex doesn't mean we're polishing each other's toenails." She looks at Skye sharply. "Or braiding each other's hair."

"Unless it's necessary for a mission," Skye says, still grinning.

Melinda wants to say _I can braid my own hair_ , but she doesn't. That would just sound childish.

"You didn't say I couldn't give you a friendship bracelet," Skye says.

"I'll kill you with my thumb if you don't let me finish this book," Melinda says, but the corner of her mouth quirks up and she knows that she's been had.

Skye leans back on the couch, sucking the salt off an edamame shell, and Melinda doesn't tell her to leave. It's the closest she'll come to admitting that they're friends.


End file.
